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AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer On Ubuntu Linux

10-24-2011, 01:00 AM

Phoronix: AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer On Ubuntu Linux

Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.

Comment

I'd say these are surprising results for Bulldozer on linux. Almost all the Windows reviewers found it to barely be competitive with the i5 2400 or 2500 depending on the test. Even with the expected 10% improvement from Windows 8, it wouldn't win at all on a Windows platform.

But I guess Linux's better threading is winning here. I'm surprised by the encoding tests where it showed to be competitive.

I'd say these are surprising results for Bulldozer on linux. Almost all the Windows reviewers found it to barely be competitive with the i5 2400 or 2500 depending on the test. Even with the expected 10% improvement from Windows 8, it wouldn't win at all on a Windows platform.

But I guess Linux's better threading is winning here. I'm surprised by the encoding tests where it showed to be competitive.

It seems these chips may actually be great server parts.

The comparison was biased. The Intel Sandy Bridge processors tested do not support SMT:

Comment

@Shining Arcanine: You mentioned a compiler benchmark, compiling LibreOffice.
I second that! That's really what I'm missing, and was one of the things I would have known, when I had to chose the base for my new PC.
It got a i7 2600K...
And now I don't know if libreoffice is the best package to test compiler performance, as libreoffice does a lot more then just throwing files into gcc. There is a lot self-baked file processing and java involved, so no benchmark for pure gcc-performance.
That lead to those numbers:
libreoffice:
Athlon II X3 435@ 2,9 GHz (stock): 1h 33min
i7 2600K: 46min
glibc:
Athlon: 21min 15sec
2600k: 7min 48sec

So sb is 3x faster at glibc but only 2x faster on libreoffice.
When comparing other packages (e.g. kdelibs, qt, glib, gtkmm, ...) numbers are always between 2x and 3x faster, with a great mayoritiy going towards 3x faster.
The guys over at anandtech have chosen chromium as Visual Studio-benchmark, look at e.g. the sandy bridge review. Probably that also is a good package, to bench gcc?